Ukraine’s “Warm Ocean Strategy”

Oleksiy Arestovych is a family psychologist and contributor to the Internet newspaper in Kyiv, Ukrains’ka Pravda. His op-ed piece, published as “Стратегія теплого океану” on Ukrains’ka Pravda‘s website on December 6, suggests that Ukraine’s Euromaidan protest movement is about ordinary people opposing a corrupt post-Soviet state through nonviolent resistance, without inspiration from a national opposition or foreign help.

“Warm Ocean Strategy”

There have been many conversations going on in society today about the right strategy to take.

I’ll give it to you now.

A strategy should meet the following criteria:

it should be simple,

it should be clear,

it should be doable,

and it should be easy enough, not requiring super efforts.

To wage a struggle successfully, you need to know the following:

who and what are you dealing with?,

what strengths do we have?,

how to apply the second question to the first one?

Let’s go.

1. Who and what are we dealing with?

We’re dealing with the System. The bureaucratic machine is the System’s skeleton. Exploiting one’s own position like one’s own property is what drives this machine. The main thing is to remove dirty, uncontrolled cash from society. The system is built just like a giant vacuum cleaner that has to pull dough right up to the top.

The system’s character is its main strength and main weakness. In particular, when it’s about money, the system’s cogs lose effectiveness.

Friends of mine in 2009 asked me to take on the duties of assistant head of the district administration in a well-known regional center of our country, so that bad people didn’t run it. I agreed to do it: it would be a an interesting cultural study, a chance to see from the inside how the state works. The district was the city’s central one, and the most curious processes took place there.

For instance, some kiosk stopped making a payoff. Administration officials complained to it:

Where’s the money, Zin?..

The kiosk’s owner gave a reasonable answer:

You go figure it out among yourselves. There are so many people complaining that I don’t know who to deliver it to, and who wants what from whom.

The officials, furious, pass a resolution to remove the kiosk:

so that this wouldn’t happen again,

so that he paid what he owed,

so that he paid for the kiosk’s return.

A crane comes, and the ones carrying out the punishment look on. The crane starts lifting up the kiosk. Before it can put it onto a flatbed, other officials, from the police, run up. The kiosk owner had paid them off just beforehand, and they came to defend him – with future payoffs in mind.

District bureaucrats start yelling at policemen. Arms are swinging; spit flies. Gawkers show up. Then the prosecutor runs up –one who also has made some agreement with the owner. He enters the conflict. A little later, the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) joins in a three-sided chess game. Then the tax inspectors join in. Later – the SES (Sanitation and Disease Control Station) and the firemen. The district police inspector comes in. The GAI (State Auto Inspection) intervenes. All of their faces turn red, all of them are foaming at the mouth, they all shout and yell, they’re all full of hate – state servants are fighting for their 50 hyrvnias. The kiosk’s owner, who at first was taking a tranquilizer to calm his nerves, begins bursting with laughter.

The moral of the story is that there is no unity in the System. Part of the System is in a fierce struggle for dirty cash, and they hate, I repeat, hate each other. It’s not just about those on the same level of power, but above all, those from the chain of command on down. Every paperpusher has to put a certain sum into the vacuum cleaner. Harvest or no harvest – take it out and put it in. But he or she wants to do it in a way so that more of it sticks to his or her own hands.

The main battle with corruption is with bureaucrats tricking each other horizontally and vertically in the System as they struggle for uncontrolled cash.

There is no common sense of mutual interests here. It’s total rot, not even rot – a cancer eating away at people’s souls and their affairs. The only thing I could not understand was why didn’t this system fall apart, like a wet piece of paper in your hands? It was worth nothing…

Further observations of mine showed that the System holds up only because of people not knowing about its real condition and because individual dealers share an instinctive desire to make things more convenient for themselves.

The System is Golem, a doll made of salt collected from our investments in it. It still holds up because of our hopes and expectations put into it, because we do not believe in ourselves, and because of its role as a third party in regulating public affairs, a role we have given it.

And its salt comes from our tears, from our deceived hopes, from our dead childhood dreams.

But today, this isn’t how it is. The System, in its greed and stupidity, has devoured itself. It has presented society with a price incommensurate with the role it has performed as a social regulator. For a long time it has taken so much and given so little that it has poisoned the life of even its cogs, the bureaucrats, with its inadequacy.

And this means that it will die.

The good news is that you don’t have to break up the doll. You just have to dissolve it.

2. What is our strength?

The American army fights better than others because it has very strict rules of engagement. They aren’t Russians who bombed out thousands of their own Russian-speaking citizens, the elderly and children, in Grozny.

In a state of danger, when you are expecting a blow from any side, you need to have a set of durable qualities to avoid falling for a hysterical desire to shoot everything that moves. And this set of durable personal qualities builds character – strict rules about opening fire that the Americans follow.

We Ukrainians have as a strength the fact that we have not descended into setting off pogroms. A nation should be in control of a very healthy spirit if it can, amid such a long list of grievances with the state, not hang it on lampposts or drown the country in blood and fire.

As for us, we have a protest that is exclusively restrained and tolerant. Without drunkards, without fights, without hysteria. A protest based on “please” and “may I.” A protest that has developed through “An Ode to Joy” and an anthem performed by thousands of voices on the country’s main square.

And our protest is joyful. With bonfires.

And the world, in awe, is slowly beginning to doff its hat to us. The world has been shaken up (it’s even started to affect the Russians).

Our strength lies in the fact that we can reach our goals without violence, and with happiness.

3. How should we apply our power to the System the right way?…

We have a System that has grown tired of itself. Very many functionaries would like to work honestly. Very many policemen dream of becoming civilized policemen and truly serving and protecting. Already everyone is fed up with the doll of salt.

We have a happy and tolerant force.

This means that we need to become an ocean that dissolves this doll.

What’s an “ocean”?…

1. This means that the System needs to become oversaturated and devoured. We need to surround it.

At the beginning of the millennium, your dear servant served in military intelligence, and in particular, he was responsible for getting intelligence needed for our forces’ deployment in Iraq. So in Iraq, I noticed one fundamental truth: the average number of attacks on coalition forces amounted to 100-120 a day. The security system that the Coalition forces had set up sustained this burden. But right after the situation heated up, the number of attacks jumped to 200-250, and it was then that the System slowly began to fall apart. Contacts were broken, supplies ran out, logistics didn’t work. Neither reserves nor reinforcements helped us.

And this wasn’t the broken down horse of the Ukrainian bureaucracy. These were the Americans. The difference is incomparable.

And the main thing is that to this very day, not a single one in the world knows what to do with this strategy. They have found no means to act against this. And they can’t be found. They don’t exist.

The rule that follows from this: we must constantly develop and sustain actions against the System. This doll won’t last long. It will become overburdened and fall apart.

2. What does “warm” mean?…

It means that our actions should be peaceful and even good.

The System’s problem is that it’s inhuman. It’s even inhuman to those who make it run, those on whom it’s dependent for its own survival. It also treats them like cattle.

Today there appeared in public photos showing a “Berkut” unit who had been worn out from constant patrols and from being moved from place to place (talk about overburdening!). Still dressed in their uniforms, they slept in a row in the hallways of the Cabinet of Ministers building – hungry, angry, dirty, and, believe me, already VERY PASSIONATELY hating their bosses.

These people had been ordered to commit a crime. The had been sent to pound children to pieces, and they were given 500 dollars each for this. Some slick paper-pusher who came in a Mercedes awarded them those dollars. “Berkut” stood there, looked, and thought, “So how much did he pocket from this?”

Senior Lieutenant Kamyshnikov, a genius for all times and all people, taught me this a long time ago, in our commanders’ school that had been awarded three red banners:

“For the system to work, you have to fuck and feed the workers. But you have to do it exactly in that order.”

This pile of rot is forgetting how to feed its own. It’s squeezing the pips out of them.

The System will collapse when its own regular functionaries begin sabotaging it.

Yesterday there was news that a bunch of people held up thirty busses with special MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) units near Vasyl’kiv. If those units wanted to drive through, people wouldn’t have been able to stop them.

This means only one thing: the commanders of these units refused to follow an order, gladly making use of a bunch of people holding hands as an excuse. The police already understood their bosses.

Just a little more pressure, and one grandma with a poster will stop echelons of tanks. And the valiant colonels will report the following: “Blocked by the people, journalists are here, I can’t kill people.” And then he’ll turn off the phone. The battery ran out, don’t you know?

Let’s not forget that it’s about a warm ocean, but an ocean. An ocean is power.

The people’s actions need to be gentle, but powerful. That means first blocking forces, yet also feeding them next.

The System’s actors understand this very sequence: at first, they must feel the pressure of firm hands at their necks, and then experience spoons brought to their mouths.

And then they’ll understand that the people are their bosses (the ones they had sworn an oath to, by the way).

So don’t strike “Berkut” with chains, but send them ladies with flowers and grandmothers with hot soup. Stroke their hair. But do it in front of men who have blocked off the military unit’s place of deployment or the building being guarded.

3. One of the System’s greatest places of strength is in its sense of anonymity. We must by all means necessary overcome this sense of anonymity.

A bureaucrat or a policeman who carries out criminal orders should instantly become a national star, and everyone should know what he or she looks like.

Personalizing the actors is one of the most powerful ways of fighting the System. Actions need to have recipients. Do not threaten. Have some sympathy for them or welcome them – that will leave a better impact.

4. An ocean needs to be salty. The strongest way to dissolve the System is to dissolve it in laughter. Irony and sarcasm are what break up the doll. Besides that, laughter gives the best support to protestors.

And finally, what does a “shot” or “action” mean?…

An “action” is any method that will have a peaceful impact on an actor of the System – a functionary or a policeman, an institution, a department, a group.

Choose actions for yourself that you can carry out, ones that make you happy, ones done out of giddiness, and ones that you can easily carry out as you go about your daily business.

Even honking your horn when you drive past a Ministry building is an act that breaks Golem up.

5. Defending our own is a key moment. For anyone who winds up in torture chambers, we must immediately get them out. For all those who have disappeared, we must immediately find them. There shouldn’t be, and there must not be, protestors who are hostages of the System. This is the cornerstone of the struggle.

We can carry out all these points mentioned, but if we give this last one up, we fall. Everything will come together like clockwork only if any protestor knows that the sky would sooner fall than someone abandoning them in a cell, in a court, in an ROVD (District Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, i.e. a local police station).

That we will pay any price to get him or her out.

Four principles:

mass character,

targeting individual people,

humor,

care.

We should make a giant, warm whirlpool around the System, one that will wash it away.

***

And most important: since yesterday, it’s become clear that everything I’d written about has worked. Initiatives have started to multiply, and they have multiplied both geographically and in terms of means. Lawyers are flooding the System with court cases, drivers are blocking bases of special units, and bloggers are publishing lists of firms belonging to Party of Regions members. It’s taken off, it’s started.

Actually, a real miracle has happened. At the beginning of events, I’d given the possibility of these developments happening only one-and-a-half percentage points.

It’s a miracle that society, no matter what, organized itself from below.

I wrote this long tract not to give someone a task to fulfill. I just wanted to help people act more consciously, to lay out certain principles and main lines of action.

We, the people, don’t need any “leaders.” You yourselves are already capable of doing this.

And this is a victory.

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Above is a Marxist take on the situation from Richard Wolff. Wolff is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the editor of the journal Rethinking Marxism. Wolff presents a passionate analysis delivered with a measure of self-congratulating “We told you so” glee. Wolff’s take can be boiled down to American consumers borrowing and borrowing in order to consume. I think Wolff’s concluding statement is more important. The global economic crisis has opened up a space to criticize the dominance of free market capitalism and offer alternative solutions. It’s a rare moment indeed when you can think outside or beyond capital and people are willing to listen. Perhaps Naomi Klein is right to say that “Wall St. crisis should be for neoliberalism what fall of Berlin Wall was for Communism.”

Interestingly, the opening of the discursive space is appearing in unlikely places. Wolff’s emphasis on debt is more or less being echoed by centrist liberals like Joesph Stigliz (I recommend his recent interview on Democracy Now!) and Fareed Zakaria. Here’s what the latter has written in the latest Newsweek:

Since the 1980s, Americans have consumed more than they produced—and they have made up the difference by borrowing.

Two decades of easy money and innovative financial products meant that virtually anyone could borrow any amount of money for any purpose. If we wanted a bigger house, a better TV or a faster car, and we didn’t actually have the money to pay for it, no problem. We put it on a credit card, took out a massive mortgage and financed our fantasies. As the fantasies grew, so did household debt, from $680 billion in 1974 to $14 trillion today. The total has doubled in just the past seven years. The average household owns 13 credit cards, and 40 percent of them carry a balance, up from 6 percent in 1970.

How then does late capitalism keep itself alive? Debt slavery and robbing Peter to pay Paul. As usual, Washington’s solution is to wage class warfare from above. Bail out the rich investors and pray the stability trickles down to the rest of us below. Same story, new packaging.

And what about Russia? Like their Western counterparts, the Russian government is poised to buy up bad assets, loan its corporations money, and flood the market with liquidity. Putin has already promised $36 billion to Russia’s banks. Last week, the Duma passed a plan to give credits to Gazprom, LUKoil, Rosneft and TNK-BP so they can pay their foreign debts, which total about $80 billion. Medvedev’s five point solution doesn’t seem much different than what most are proposing: Regulation, transparency, and increase free trade. Or basically apply band-aids at a time when invasive surgery is needed.

On Friday, I went to my local photo shop to get some passport sized photos for a library card. While I was waiting I noticed a letter sized portrait of Vladimir Putin on the wall. This was no regular portrait that you see in most government buildings with Vlad looking all presidential and, incidentally, ever so metrosexual. This one was of Putin the commando. It was him, shoulders up, so you could see he was wearing a winter commando jacket and fur hat. I couldn’t help thinking of not just the cheesiness of the portrait, nor just how easy the ubiquitous pictures of Lenin of the Soviet times too easily returned in different content, but I also wondered what will happen to Russia once their beloved Vanya is gone.

Such is also the question increasingly on every Russian politicos’ mind: What will happen in 2008? You see, in 2008, there will be a Presidential election, in which Putin cannot run because of term limits. The newspaper articles seem non-stop. They overflow with predictions of chaos. From the necessity of a handpicked successor to avert chaos to complete doomsday scenarios about colored revolutions and the Russian State imploding. There doesn’t seem to be any room for any middle ground. Authoritarian anti-chaos or democratic chaos. Take your pick.

These views, of course, break down by political affiliation. Many liberal democratic politicos envision, or rather hope, for some kind of Russian version of a “colored revolution” similar to their cousins in the Ukraine and southern neighbors in Georgia. Many liberals are already mobilizing their grassroots forces a la Ukraine to prepare for the 2008 challenge. Yabloko is trying to make a political comeback. Students and other youths are starting to form their own anti-Putin groups. Taking a page from the Ukrainian youth group Pora (It’s Time) and the Georgian group Kmara (Enough), Russian youth groups like Yabloko Youth led by Ilya Yashin, Mikhail Obozov’s Idushchiye bez Putina (Walking Without Putin), student associations Ia Dumaiu (I Think) and Da (Yes) are starting early in anticipation of a 2008 showdown in the streets. The groups first began networking on the internet. Since the pensioner protests at the beginning of the year, they had increased in membership and furthered their activities. Speaking to the LA Times in January, Mikhail Obozov summed up liberal youths desire in this way:

“We are not for bloody revolutions or cataclysms. We are looking for normal democratic development. But if they continue their suppression of all possibilities, I’m afraid some bloody variation of events is possible. In Ukraine, everything went down peacefully. It won’t be like that in Russia.”

Translated: we’re not for chaos, but we won’t shy away from it either.

Many “pro-democracy” (whatever that means in the Russian context) advocates are hoping former Prime Minister Mikhail Krasianov makes a run for President. In something that is pretty unprecedented in Russian politics, Krasianov openly criticized Putin for his move away from democracy. Many observers note that Krasianov might be one of the few Russian politicians who could muster not only a coalition of liberal or anti-Putin parties, the backing of Russians Oligarchs, and possibly exploit the factions that have developed in Putin’s clan of former KGB/FSB and other security elites, the Siloviki.

Such political hopes for many Russian liberals might never get beyond hope, though their early mobilizations might fare them well. All this, especially the youth activity, only fuels the already widespread beliefs that the CIA orchestrated the “revolution” in the Ukraine with a combination of marketing and Soros money. Putin supporters and nationalists thus vow that Russia will not tolerate any “colored revolutions,” and some concrete steps are being taken to make that so. Pro-Putin youth have since ditched the moderate youth group, Idushchie vmeste (Marching Together), for the much more openly nationalist Nashi (Ours). Though the group has not been officially endorsed by the Putin Administration, its leader, Vasily Yakemenko also headed Marching Together. Nashi, says Yakemenko, has a long list enemies: oligarchs, bureaucrats, and what he called “fascist” enemies, which, as he told the Christian Science Monitor, includes “counter-revolution of former officials trying to seize power” (3/16/2005).

Despite the difficultly in imaging life with Putin, legislaters squashed the anticipated official move to allow Putin to run again. Last week, Lower Duma member Alexander Moskalets from United Russia introduced legislation that would alter Chapter V, Article 32.4 of the Russian Constitution so Putin could run again. The bill only gained 32 of the 226 votes it needed to pass. Such a defeat shows that United Russia, which dominates the Duma and is Putin’s party doesn’t even favor such a move.

It seems that the Putin/United Russia camp is paving a different road to victory in 2008. Despite the emergence of a more militant youth group like Nashi, United Russia might attempt to transform itself into a centrist party that places “Just imagine if they came to power” at the center of their platform. The “they” in this slogan is the Communist Party and Rodina (Homeland) the respective far left and right parties. In an interview given to the German weekly Der Spiegel this week, Putin deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, described a strategy where, unlike their main opponents, United Russia is preparing for the future without looking to the past for solutions. This means that United Russia will focus on providing viable candidates not just for President, but for lower political positions as well. It is also looking to present an inclusiveness that could siphon off support of liberal democratic parties like Yabloko.

Yet the doomsday scenario continues to weigh heavily in the political discourse around 2008. After all, Untied Russia’s “Just imagine” slogan is a play against imagined right and left wing political chaos. Surkov’s response to Der Spiegel’s question about a potential revolt rising was “Sure, there will certainly be some attempts to stage a coup – but they will not succeed.” (Vedomosti, 6/30/2005). The assurance that there will be “certainly be some attempts” is an equivocal yes something will happen.

But will it? Such is hard to say. With the specter of revolution in Russia is only being fueled by the simultaneous hope and the fear of a repeat of the Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan informing the entire discourse surrounding of 2008, it will certainly be anti-climatic if there isn’t. It certainly seems that in the Russian and Western press, 2008 is being built up to Y2K proportions. There is no middle ground. Any suggestion of normalcy is cast off as naive.

However, one does have to wonder why normalcy for Russia is so out of the question. Sure, daily life lacks predictability. There is always some stumbling block. Take a small, but I think telling example. One day, I went to buy a bass pass and was refused purchase because I didn’t have exact change. The women in the ticket booth did not have 30 rubles to give me change. I walked away without a pass. Such is a standard occurrence. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve got eye fucked by grocery store checkers for not having kopecks for exact change. At the same time, there is a saying here in Russia: “Nel’zia, no vozmozhno” (It is forbidden, but possible.) There are barriers everywhere, but all barriers are movable. If you know how to play the game, especially if it involves bribes of money, chocolate, flowers, tea, etc, all things are possible. Daily life is a constant negotiation that involves a set of personal relations that stand in for the lack of legal ethic. (Here I mean not the rule of Law, whose existence here is also quesntionable, but an professional/service ethic that governs daily transactions.) If this game occurs on a micropoltical level can you imagine it in the macropolitical heavens of Russian politics?

The sheer lack of predictability creates a political culture that assumes chaos as the norm. Everyone predicted said chaos in the transition from Yeltsin to Putin, and when that chaos didn’t happen it was then argued that it was because Yeltsin handpicked a successor. Chaos inevitable and chaos averted in the same breath. Now, it is the same line. There will be some kind of chaos unless Putin runs again or hand picks a successor. His opponents are predicting a chaos of their own because they seem to believe that since Russian “democracy” is a sham, the only way to come to power is through chaos.

They are right about one thing: Russian democracy is a sham. But the only people who seem to care about this are Russian liberals who want power and the Western, mostly American, observers who see the Yukos affair as a sign of, that’s right, chaos. My sense is that most Russians don’t care about Putin’s assault on freedom of speech and political rights. They certainly don’t care about Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos. As far as they’re concerned, he is a crook.

What many Russians are looking for is a predictability to the micropolitical chaos that rules their life. They don’t care, or need, anymore. They care about stability. A predictable chaos, if you would. For them, Putin’s rule has established at least a semblance of it. It has put the breaks on the truly chaotic times of the 1990s. This new stability is not necessarily happening economically, though it perceived as better than ten years ago. The stability is mostly happening culturally. Reconciliation with the Soviet past has finally begun that doesn’t damn it, but praises its achievements. Nothing said this more than the recent 60th Anniversary of Victory Day celebrations. The glory of defeating the Nazis was relived through red flags with images of Stalin and Lenin. Putin has slyly absorbed the Soviet Union into his narrative. It lives in content, but not in form. This doesn’t mean that Putin is a Communist. Not by a long shot. What it does mean is that he is exploiting a nostalgia for the stability that the Soviet Union provided without actually providing it.

This is why I think when 2008 arrives, United Russia will come out on top because people don’t want to “imagine if they came to power.” And in my local photo shop, the Putin as commander picture will come down, and the picture of some, probably, handpicked Putin successor will take his place. Commando suit and all.